Commentators with no scientific expertise, ranging from politicians such as Republican congressman Joe Barton from Texas, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, or Republican Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma, to blog writers Stephen McIntyre and Marc Morano, have repeatedly promulgated misinformation and sought to launch formal investigations into Mann’s research, claiming professional misconduct or worse, even though it had been peer reviewed and confirmed by other scientists

Hmm. A couple of problems here.

First, one of those “commentators with no scientific expertise” he names is Stephen McIntyre, who is so inexpert that he spotted flaws that forced Karoly and his co-authors to withdraw a recent peer-reviewed paper that had made various wild claims about Australia never having seen such rapid warming.

Embarrassment plus.

As Karoly admitted to McIntyre at the time:

An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in the study, which may affect the results. While the paper states that “both proxy climate and instrumental data were linearly detrended over the 1921–1990 period”, we discovered on Tuesday 5 June that the records used in the final analysis were not detrended for proxy selection, making this statement incorrect. Although this is an unfortunate data processing issue, it is likely to have implications for the results reported in the study. The journal has been contacted and the publication of the study has been put on hold.

But since then has come Karoly’s brazen attack of McIntyre for nevertheless being a klutz. And worse, as McIntyre now protests:

There is something in Karoly’s approach to debate and reaction to informed criticism that does not inspire me with confidence.

Steve McIntyre was once a Canadian mathematics prize winner. He is still active in statistics and geology and is a master squash player. Where he gets the time and energy to audit climate ‘scientists’ is beyond me. Go suck eggs Karoly, something the well mannered McIntyre wont say. Do yourself a favour and listen and learn from him. Your words are just projections of yourself. You are even funded by our government, whereas Steve McIntyre is entirely self funded.

Steve McIntyre has posted his letter to David Karoly regarding Karoly’s book review, covered by WUWT here. Karoly responds with a suggestion he’s been given a ‘legal threat’. After reading McIntyre’s letter, I’m reminded of the non-existent death threats towards climate scientists in Australia…because I sure can’t find any legal threat from Steve. Maybe David Appell can use his superior death threat knowledge to pinpoint this. /sarc